Author: Jasper Siegmund

Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

First of all I’d like to start by wishing everyone a very happy 2018! 2017 was a great year and I’m sure that 2018 will also have some great new things to come! Traditionally December doesn’t bring us that much news so this edition is a little shorter than what you’re used to.

Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

Where the previous edition featured a lot of stuff due to Ignite, things are a bit slow for this one. But still, some good news came from Redmond!

Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

The Ignite 2017 conference took place this month. And as always with the bigger Microsoft conferences: there was news, lots of it. So this months list is a little bit longer than usual!

Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to leave and comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

App Service specific updates

Also from the Azure Functions world, the Tools for Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 are now available. And even better: you get them as part of the update, no manual installation required! (link)

Have you tried turning it off and on again? With Proactive Auto Heal, your webapps will auto restart when they’re in a bad state (memory leak for instance). It does this by monitoring the memory and request time. Note that is now is on by default, but you can opt-out. (link)

It’s now very easy to choose a Docker image from Azure Container Registry for Continuous Deployment schemes. (link)

The app services team now keeps track of their updates in blog posts and in this github repo! And you can find a monthly update on their blog as well.

Visual Studio (Team Services)

Everything slows down in summertime, right? Well not in the world of VSTS! These are just the cherries from the huge list of updates!

Creating Wiki pages is now in public preview. Wiki’s support markdown (like other pages) and can be very useful to create documentation for instance. (link)

Search for and recreating deleted branches. Makes you wonder what the definition of “delete” is, but hey… we’ve all needed this one at one time. (link)

A new version of the dotnet (2.x) build task supports authenticated package sources. There were also changes in the behavior when it cannot find a project file (now fails) and to specifying an explicit output path. (link)

The marketplace now features an extensions for Ansible support. (link)

Running Web Tests from the test hub, you can now capture screenshots of desktop apps. (link)

A new work items hub allows filtering work based on: Assigned to me, Following, Mentioned, My activity, Recently created. (link)

In a “if this, than that” style you can now create work item rules to automate things even more. (link)

Refering to .NET Core / .NET Standard libraries without the need to add interop packages. They’re still needed but VS includes them automatically now.

Supported in Visual Studio for Mac.

Talking about Visual Studio for Mac, that team released version 7.1 of their product to the public. (link)

Azure Event Grid (in preview) allows the routing of infrastructure and application level events to all kinds of components within Azure. Allows you to hook into events like “someone was added to my Azure subscription”. And it’s serverless! (link)

That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!

Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to leave and comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

App Services updates

The app services team announced a couple of new updates in their monthly blog post. These include:

Azure CDN now supports https on custom domains, something that you could previously only do with one of the external CDN services (link).

New App Service Overview BladeThe new overview blade should perform faster making is easier to switch between apps. The charts can be pinned to custom dashboards which might improve the performance of those as well (a little bit).

Integrated experience for Windows and Linux based appsWhen creating a new app service instance, you can now pick which OS the instance needs to host your app.

App Service Advisor recommendation historyThe app service advisor will provide proactive recommendations on how to solve problems within your application. It now features the ability to view past recommendations.

Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to leave and comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy! Read More

I a quest to optimize the performance of my WordPress powered site, I thought I’d give Redis Cache a go. Redis Cache has become the industry default when it comes to caching in a key-value style. Azure has a Redis Cache offering which you can use to enhance the performance of any app. If you’re not familiar with caching: it’s a mechanism to eliminate timely data retrieval actions. Caching can be implemented several different places: you web browser uses caching so that it does not have to retrieve all files on every load. Redis Cache is usually more targeted towards scenario’s like database connections. Instead of getting items from a database table, which usually is relatively slow, you can get them from the cache instead.

Have you been coding your chat bot using the Microsoft Bot Framework? Good news! One of the long awaited features is finally here: the Skype for Business channel! Using this channel, you can now get your but to communicate with users using Skype for Business. This is especially good news for enterprises where S4B is often the primary communication tool. Bots were already available through Microsoft Teams, but not all companies are ready for that yet. Skype was in there as well, but is mostly used on the consumer side. So great to have Skype for Business joining the club!